Appendix. 380 
not far from the spot; but when half way to it he would 
look back, and, seeing the vultures advancing once more to 
the corpse, would rush back to protect it. The soldiers 
watched him for some time with great interest, and once 
more they tried in vain to get him to follow them. Two 
days afterwards they revisited the spot, to find the dog 
lying dead by the side of his dead master. I had this story 
from the lips of one of the witnesses. 
In all such cases, whether the dog watches over, conceals, 
or buries a dead body, he is doubtless moved by the same 
instinct which leads him to safeguard the animal he is 
attached to—another dog or his human master. But, as 
the dead animal is past help, it is, of course, a blunder of 
the instinct; and the blunder must be of very much less 
frequent occurrence among wild than among domestic 
animals. In a state of nature, when a gregarious animal 
dies, he dies, as a rule, alone; his body is not seen by his 
former companions, and he is not missed. When he dies by 
violence—which is the common fate—the body is carried off 
or devoured by the killer. This being the usual order, there 
is no instinct, except in a very few species, relating to the 
disposal of the dead among mammals and other vertebrates, 
such as is found in ants and other social insects. There are 
a few mammalians that live together in small communities, 
in a habitation made to last for many generations, in which 
such an instinct would appear necessary, and it accordingly 
exists, but is very imperfect. This is the case with the 
vizcacha, the large rodent of the pampas, which lives with 
its fellows, to the number of twenty or thirty, in a cluster of 
huge burrows. When a vizcacha dies in a burrow, the body 
is dragged out and thrown on to the mound among the mass 
of rubbish collected on it—but not until he has been dead a 
long time, and there is nothing left of him but the dry bones 
held together by the skin. In that condition the other 
members of the community probably cease to look on him as 
one of their companions who has fallen into a long sleep; he 
is no more than so much rubbish, which must be cleared out 
